Welcome reader! This is a book about scripting with Clojure and babashka. Clojure is a functional, dynamic programming language from the Lisp family which runs on the JVM. Babashka is a scripting environment made with Clojure, compiled to native with GraalVM. The primary benefits of using babashka for scripting compared to the JVM are fast startup time and low memory consumption. Babashka comes with batteries included and packs libraries like clojure.tools.cli for parsing command line arguments and cheshire for working with JSON. Moreover, it can be installed just by downloading a self-contained binary.

Conjure is an interactive environment for evaluating code within your running program.

The core features of Conjure are language agnostic (although it’s targeted at Lisps for now), with each language client providing their own extra tools. Here’s the currently supported languages, contributions and 3rd party plugins that add clients are highly encouraged! You can find a comparison table for all clients and supported features in the wiki.

Sometimes, in a vast and healthy developer ecosystem of a language like Clojure, it can be difficult to know where to get started when you want to build an application. The target audience of this series is developers who have some Clojure syntax in their hands and want to start building applications.